Category: regressive left

By Yasmine Mohammed At the age of six, I bolted out the front doors of my elementary school and ran to give my first-grade teacher a goodbye hug. As I skipped towards my mother, my bubbly mood was snatched away by her stern voice and admonishing stare. “Did you just hug your teacher?” my mother asked. “Yah, I love Mrs. Roth!” “You do not hug non-Muslims! That is disgusting,” she said. She then marched me over to the principal’s office to demand that Mrs. Roth never touch her child again. I sat in…

By Amjad Khan The well-known British political commentator Douglas Murray once observed that sections of the political left, known as the regressive left, have a supply and demand problem with bigotry. He elaborated that there simply aren’t enough racists in the West these days yet the demand for such bigotry is at an all-time high. Without the demand left-wing activists that organise themselves as anti-bigotry activists can’t justify their work and, more importantly, request for donations. Hence, the definition of bigotry needs to be stretched, new sources of bigotry…

By Iram Ramzan Critics of the Government’s counter-terrorism Prevent strategy often claim that it disproportionately targets and focuses on Muslims, despite the fact that it actually works on countering the far-right too. So what does the Muslim Council of Britain decide to do? It has decided to set up its own programme to target, er, Muslims. In a direct challenge to the government’s ‘controversial’ Prevent scheme, the MCB plans to start the Muslim-run counter-radicalisation scheme next year. The MCB said in a statement: In reflecting the wishes of a cross-section…

By Haydar Zaki and Iram Ramzan Usually when a Muslim person is discriminated against by a non Muslim, it becomes a huge news story. And rightly so, as we must challenge any discriminative actions. But what do we do when Muslims are discriminated against, and persecuted, by fellow Muslims? If the former is ‘Islamophobic’ then what do we call the latter? Nearly a thousand British Muslims recently signed a petition to ban the Shia procession of Ashura in Luton. This procession, to commemorate the death of the prophet Muhammad’s grandson Imam Hussein,…

By Arshia Malik Islamophobia is a term bandied around very casually these days on anything and anybody who stands up to the regressive practices in Muslim culture and denounces their oppressive characteristics. The first to scream Islamophobia are the practicing Muslims themselves at ex-Muslims, or agnostic Muslims, or liberal Muslims who feel they should speak out against the various shortcomings in their culture, their religion, their text and their fellow Muslims. A disclaimer first – I am aware that many cases of discrimination and abuse against Muslims are on…

By Haydar Zaki I am starting to see articles and TV interviews with the newly appointed NUS president, Malia Bouattia, discussing the accusations that have been put to her with the headlines that she “is clearing her name.” However, from the pieces and interviews I’ve seen, it seems that nothing has actually been cleared up. In fact if anything, the accusations of anti-Semitism and extremism apologia are even more muddied. One exchange with an interviewer in particular had summed up the whole situation. The interviewer asked her: “Do you…